Shakespeare’s Jacobean Plays

Abstract

The death of Queen Elizabeth I on 24 March 1603 and the accession of King James I were changes of enormous impact in an England already experiencing massive change — political, religious, economic, demographic, technological, cultural — as the late middle ages gave way to the early modern era, and as societal structures and practices as well as systems of personal relationships associated with feudalism gave way to those of nascent capitalism. At her death, Elizabeth had ruled for forty-five years, longer than most of her subjects had been alive. Her dying marked the end of one dynasty, the Tudors, whose rule had lasted for more than a century, and the coming to power of a new dynasty, the Stuarts. With her death the English crown was not simply passing from one monarch to another and one dynasty to another. It was passing to a foreign prince. When Elizabeth Tudor died, James Stuart was already king of Scotland, and in 1603 England and Scotland were distinct nations — and remained so, despite his strenuous efforts to unite them, until 1707. Before travelling from Edinburgh to London after Elizabeth’s death, James had never been to England, and about their new king his English subjects knew little beyond the facts that he had a reputation as an intellectual and was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had kept under house arrest for nearly two decades before authorising her execution in 1587 for plotting to seize the crown.